My phone rang.
Was it Cade? My heart leapt into my throat and I fumbled for the phone, hitting the ‘answer’ button. “Hello?”
“Is this Laura?”
It wasn’t Cade. It was his mother, Melinda.
My throat clamped up in panic and I had to clear it. “This is Laura, yes.”
“Ah,” Melinda sounded like she was a queen talking to a mud-covered peasant. “You now, I had my suspicions about you from the first, when Della suddenly broke off the engagement after talking to you. I thought that you’d sabotaged the engagement to have Cade for yourself. My son is a charming man and Della has a lot of insecurities. I wouldn’t have put it past you.”
“Thank you,” I replied in sarcasm. “You have officially insulted me in the worst way possible. I appreciate you being honest about thinking that I was a weasel who would break up a happy couple in order to steal the man for herself. You know, if a relationship is happy and strong, it takes more than just one conversation to convince someone to call it off. I hope you’ll apologize to Della when we’re finished with our conversation, since you’ve apparently got this opinion that she’s a spineless dolt who is stupid and weak willed to be manipulated into breaking off her engagement even if she really cared about the man.”
I could practically hear Melinda’s jaw dropping. “I’ve never been talked to like this in my life.”
“A pity. Maybe if you had been a nicer person to spend time with Cade then he wouldn’t be living in fear of you nor despise you,” I snapped.
My heart was broken, the man I loved had left me, and there were reporters circling like sharks to try and take advantage of my son, a helpless child who didn’t understand what was going on. I had nothing left to lose and nowhere else to direct my anger and pain.
“Cade never liked you, or your husband. He hid me from you to protect me. I always knew that he didn’t like you, but he never told me why, never went into the details, and now I know. It’s because you’re only concerned with appearances and your prestige. You don’t care about being kind nor doing what really matters. You only want status and applause.
“I didn’t manipulate Della in any way. I never wanted Cade back in my life. He broke my heart ten years ago, and the last thing I wanted was to ever see him again. I told him that I didn’t want a relationship and that I wanted nothing to do with him anymore. If you have a problem with this relationship, then you can go talk to the man you raised to be a coward and who can’t even stand up to his own parents.”
Tears began to stream down my face again, undoubtedly ruining my makeup, and I took a sip of coffee to steady myself. It was too hot, and I only ended up burning my tongue. “Della’s a wonderful woman and she deserves better people than you as her in-laws. She deserves to be married to someone she loves. All I did was tell her to do what made her truly happy and that if she was having panic attacks about this wedding, she probably shouldn’t go through with it.”
The emotions were just flowing out of freely, undeterred. “Did it ever occur to you to trust her at her word? You used her. You’re convinced that she doesn’t have a will of her own! I wanted this wedding to go as planned, I needed this job, but now here we are. Because you raised your son to disrespect people the way you disrespect them, he hired a private investigator to find out everything about my life, to invade my privacy, and now my son can’t even go outside without reporters trying to use him like a piece of meat!”
Silence reigned on the other end of the line. For a moment I thought that Melinda had hung up. Then she said, her voice much meeker, “You should have come to us when you found out that you were pregnant. Hiding the child wasn’t fair to Cade, or to me and my husband. We missed out on years of getting to know our grandchild. We missed out on his first steps, his first words, his first loose tooth….”
To my utter shock, she sounded heartbroken.
“What would you have done?” I asked her. “If I’d showed up, a trailer trash teenage girl with no father and a horrible mother, knocked up out of wedlock and claiming that the child belonged to your son? Cade never told you he was dating me. What would you have said? Would you have even believed me? Or would you have kicked me out, or paid me to keep me quiet, or called me a liar?
“Even if you did believe me, would you have forced me to go to the college of your choice and made me marry Cade immediately? Would you have decided to control my life the way you control every aspect of Cade’s?
“Your son told me, after months of dating, that I meant nothing to him and I was just a fling, just for fun until he got out of this town and went on to pursue his real future. I was a teenager and I was heartbroken—I’d just been treated like trash. Why would I trust your son to be kind to me after what he did? Why would I trust you after he’d made it clear that he distrusted and disliked you?
“You and your son gave me no reason to believe that I’d receive a warm welcome coming to you. I am sorry you missed out on those milestones with your grandson. I truly am. My intention was never to hurt anyone. But I had to
